Booking Sites.

Booking sites

    This post will help and save time looking for recommended booking websites
 

First, it helps to understand the playing field. There are basically three types of websites we use to find hotels: OTAs (online travel agencies); the hotels’ own websites, which may offer deals OTAs can’t match (and you should always double-check yourself before booking); and aggregators, or meta-search engines, which don’t actually handle reservations—they trawl both OTAs and hotel sites to return a compendium of results, then send you to your choice for booking.

 

 

1)      Hotels.com :

It has the best and most robust filters in the business—tied, in fact, using them helps you sort the results in a range of flexible ways. But Hotels.com needs to improve its price performance if it wants to rise in the rankings.

 

Pros: Super-fast refresh; full slate of filtering/sort-by options, including one for accessibility; lots of lodging types; decent (but never the best) prices; honest about the fact it factors its own commissions into ranking the search results (yes, it informs you in teensy fine print you have to click to read, but at least it’s honest)

Cons: Not very strong internationally, especially in the lower price categories.

 

2)      Booking.com:

 still smokes the competition when it comes to the sheer number of city-center lodgings it can find, especially for under $200. Where it has slipped over the years (over time, from #1 to #4 to #6) is on price. Booking used to find the best or near-best rate about two-thirds of the time, if not more. This time: never. Its price performance was exceedingly average—and, for the first time in seven years, it actually returned the highest price twice. 

 

We do like to note that it remains one of the more honest sites. Each hotel has lots of user reviews that, unlike at crowdsourced sites, are guaranteed to be from actual guests (you can only post a review if you’ve booked through the site and only after you’ve completed your stay).

 

Pros: Includes taxes from the start (except in North America); usually finds far more properties than any other site—OTA or aggregator—especially in the lower price brackets; decent selection of filters and sort-by options

 

Cons: Occasionally returns a below-average price; like its corporate cousin Agoda, it uses annoying and condescending pressure-sales tactics such as results tagged with a red-text "Only 3 rooms left on our site!"

 

3)      Trivago.com:

 Stumbled after its initial success but has regained its footing since the last time we put it through the wringer. it was not nearly so successful at finding hotels under $200 (and even less so for rates under $75). However, Trivago was far more annoying to use than other top sites. It was the only site on this list that never gave an indication of taxes and fees in results—you have to click over to the booking site for that—which means its "lowest rate" might have hidden fees that actually make it far more expensive. Example: Trivago returned a wow quote of $121 on a hotel in Orlando nearly every other site had at $199, but when we clicked over to the site with the deal, Bedsopia, the total you’d pay was actually $246. Is that helpful, Trivago? 

 

Pros: Simple user interface; fast refreshes; does direct searches on hotels’ own sites

 

Cons: Far fewer choices than most; featured prices are not always available, come with hidden taxes and fees, or are from a sketchy OTA; formerly robust filters have been oversimplified; only shows the top 125 results based on a given criterion.

 

 

 

Resources:

 https://www.frommers.com/slideshows/819303-best-and-worst-hotel-booking-sites-for-2022

https://www.hotellinksolutions.com/direct-and-indirect-everything-about-your-hotel-booking-sources/